The New York Times · 14 October 1985

CP-1985-022

Palestinian Says Hijackers Told Him They Didn’t Kill Anyone

By EDWARD SCHUMACHER

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Transcribed from the clipping

TUNIS, Oct. 13 — Mohammed Abbas, the Palestinian leader wanted by the Reagan Administration on charges of organizing the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, said today that the hijackers had told him they did not kill anyone. Mr.

Abbas said that if Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old wheelchair-bound American, died in the hijacking, it was probably because of a heart attack. Mr. Abbas also said that he had had nothing to do with the hijacking but that he would seek to free the four hijackers, now being held in Italy, so they could be tried in a Palestinian court.

He said the four told him they acted on their own. Mr. Abbas, leader of a faction of the Palestine Liberation Front, spoke in a long telephone interview from Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He flew to Belgrade on Saturday night from Rome, where Italian authorities ignored an American extradition request and allowed him to leave. the country.

“My plans are to keep resisting, fighting and asking for the peace process and our sovereign rights,” Mr. Abbas said. He spoke through an interpreter, Ahmed Ben Bella, an official of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella organization headed by Yasir Arafat. Mr. Abbas’s group is a member of the P.L.O. Mr.

Abbas’s wife, Rim, 30 years old, stood by in Tunis during the half-hour interview. Mr. Abbas, a tall, mustachioed man in his early 40’s, was sent by Mr. Arafat to negotiate the surrender of the four hijackers.

He was accompanying them on a plane out of Egypt when the plane was intercepted by American F-14 jet fighters from the Sixth Fleet and forced to land in Sicily. The United States has charged Mr. Abbas with complicity in the murder of Mr. Klinghoffer and has submitted an extradition request to Yugoslavia. “If someone really died, which I doubt,” Mr.

Abbas said today, “then for sure it was a matter of a heart attack and the responsibility of the captain.” He said that the four hijackers were unsure if anyone died but that they assured him they had not killed anyone. They told him that the fright and chaos on board immediately after the four seized the ship might have provoked a heart attack.

“When they were asked if they killed anyone,” he said, “they replied, ‘We are fighters for freedom, not killers, kidnappers or hijackers.’” He said the four told him they had not intended to hijack the ship. He said they had planned to sneak into the Israeli port of Ashdod when they were discovered on board.

He said proof of their intentions was that they treated the crew and passengeres in a “nice way” and did not harm any of several Israeli passengers who he said were on board. Asked about his own role, Mr. Abbas said: “I knew nothing about such kind of an operation being organized.

When I asked where they got the order, they said, ‘We decided to do it ourselves and on our own.’”

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